Bill Jonas on Sat, 17 Jun 2000 05:57:34 -0400 (EDT)


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Re: [PLUG] stuied newbie problem...


On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Michael C. Toren wrote:

>Or, use "passwd -l user" to lock an account, and "passwd -u user"
>to unlock it.  It works by placing an invalid character ("!") in
>the user's crypted password string.

Going back to the original question, you could set the user's password
as root.  Maybe this depends on the distribution, but in my experience,
it'll warn you that the password is too short, but will let you do it
anyway.  If you then log in as the user, you'll get a password prompt,
but you'll just hit enter.  If you remove the encrypted password from
the /etc/shadow file (Yes, you really need to be using shadow
passwords; Corel is the only distro that I've seen that doesn't ship
already using shadow passwds.  Type 'shadowconfig on' as root.), then
you won't even get the password prompt.

Bill
-- 
>Ever heard of .cshrc?             | "Linux means never having to delete
That's a city in Bosnia. Right?    |  your love mail." -- Don Marti
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc  |  http://www.netaxs.com/~bj/
on the intuitiveness of commands.) |  http://www.harrybrowne.org/


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